Thirty three Lankan students to write programs for Google

Google has published a statistical breakdown of the students accepted to participate in this year's 'Google Summer of Code' (GSoC) event. According to a 'post' by Stephanie Taylor on the Google Open Source Blog, the final total of 1,115 students includes participants from 68 countries, slightly down from 69 last year, Google received more than 5,650 applications from 3,731 students in 97 countries.

The three countries with the highest number of accepted students for the 2011 event are the United States with 191 students, followed by India with 182 and Germany with 65; these are the same top three of last year. China (65) and Poland (48) rounded out the top five. Finishing off the top 10 were Brazil (46), Romania (45), Russian Federation (41), France (33) and Sri Lanka (33). All other countries, including the UK and Canada which made it into last year's top 10, accounted for the remaining 380 students.

Taylor notes that, for the 2011 contest, there are 6 countries which haven't previously been represented in GSoC: Cambodia, Georgia, Guatemala, Kyrgyz Republic, Rwanda and Uruguay. The 'community bonding period, during which the students will become familiar with their organisations' processes, developer interactions and codes of conduct, will end on May 23 when the coding will officially begin.

Each year Google seeks students and mentors to take part in its annual GSoC event, which takes place over three months. GSoC offers university students stipends to write and develop code for various open source projects. Over the past six years, 4,500 students from more than 85 countries have completed the GSoC program with support from over 300 mentoring organisations. - Google